Tag Archives: populism

I’ve watched a lot of Trump vids over the past 6 months. Mostly rallies, some interviews, speeches, portions of the debates. A variety of stuff. Much of it is very worth watching. Yesterday’s rallies in Forth Worth and Oklahoma City, for instance: both among the best that I’ve seen.

Tonight, though, I came across something special so I will link it here, I encourage everyone to give it a click and enjoy:

I won’t embed that because it’s much better in a full sized window, preferably hi-def if your regional YouTube server can feed it to you.

One of the best things about it is all the crowd shots. Having watched so many rallies where the cameras never! move! one! single! inch! it’s really refreshing, even thrilling, to see the size of these crowds.

I had some minor car trouble today, which gave me some unexpected time to watch one of the recent Trump rallies. This one was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, held yesterday. It’s one of the better rallies I’ve seen. Here’s a link to the video:

What’s the best part? Towards the end, he’s talking about the wall, and how the president of Mexico said, “Mexico is NEVER going to pay for that wall. NEVER.” So the press calls on Trump and asks, “Do you have a comment?” Trump’s response, “Yes, tell him the wall just got 10 feet taller. Tell him.” And the crowd goes wild.

We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people that, frankly, if they were there and if we could have spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges, and all of the other problems — our airports and all the other problems we have — we would have been a lot better off, I can tell you that right now.

We have done a tremendous disservice not only to the Middle East — we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have been wiped away — and for what? It’s not like we had victory. It’s a mess. The Middle East is totally destabilized, a total and complete mess. I wish we had the 4 trillion dollars or 5 trillion dollars. I wish it were spent right here in the United States on schools, hospitals, roads, airports, and everything else that are all falling apart!

An American presidential candidate said that. Look at what he’s saying. Does that not sound pretty close to something that an old style liberal candidate might say? Grass roots liberals used to espouse exactly this sort of ideal, and used it to appeal to working class voters.

What Trump is doing in this campaign is remarkable in a number of ways, but perhaps what is most heartening is that he is able to frame things in ways that that liberals and conservatives ought to agree on. Ask a Black Lives Matter supporter, for instance, what might be accomplished with $4 trillion and whether he wouldn’t support using that money for domestic programs rather than pissing it away in useless overseas wars. It’s a no brainer!

Trump has been demonstrating that the long-standing left-right political game in the US is largely theater—a fiction, a contrived drama that focuses on hot-button issues to keep us occupied while the elite go about their business of screwing over the entire world at our expense. If only liberals would pay attention to what he says.

I have a feeling that Trump will be doing more to attract center-left voters as the primary race moves along, while at the same time deftly avoiding alienating his conservative supporters. He is foraging a new political coalition, and one that sorely needs to form: a coalition of Americans who actually love America. We do have some dissent on what exactly to do about that, but what we have in common is our ultimate goal: to make America great again.